Faith & Christmas Eve

This is going to be a very difficult day. Were the situation any different, I would choose to just draw the curtains, pull the blankets up and crawl into a hole until, maybe February. At minimum tomorrow. That’s not a choice though. I slept through my alarm this morning. As I write this I’ve been up for half an hour or so. Meds are on board. I’ve already taken my first Xanax. Anxiety is gripping me so tightly that my hands are so numb I can barely write this. My entire body is tingling. My chest is constricted and aching. Each breath is a focused effort. Just another day in wonderland. So here are the plans for today. An early Christmas Eve dinner with my girl’s family followed by a candlelight service at a nearby church. The dinner itself may be tense due to the fact that my girl and I had some issues a couple of months ago. Everything is copacetic now, but her family is protective. I have no problem at all with that, in fact I applaud it. Every girl deserves that. They’re good people too. There won’t be any open hostility. Once everyone sees that everything is okay, I think that everything will be fine. It’s actually the church service that’s on my mind. I haven’t stepped into a church for any kind of religious service in almost sixteen years. Not since I lost my Mom. January will be the anniversary of the date she took her own life. I still remember clearly coming back from the morgue where I had viewed her, ran my fingers through her hair one final time. At the house some pastor I did not know put his arm around me like we were best friends. “Don’t worry son,” he said. “God won’t put any more on you than you can handle.” That was it. That’s all it took. The sheer hypocrisy of his words were the detonation  that blew me away from organized religion. And now here I am. My girl has been looking for something to reconnect her with her faith. She’s angry at God too. We have separate views on how things work. She believes in the Holy Trinity. I was raised the son of an abusive, sexually marauding preacher and long ago lost the ability to take things on faith. I believe in a higher power, a God. I’m not sure what his name is. I believe that many people call him by many names and the has had many prophets, Jesus among them. My girl worries about this because she doesn’t want me to compromise my faith by going to a church with her. I’ve told her I’ll go to any church she wants, because I love her, and I can find feel love whether I’m in a church, a temple, a mosque or a synagogue. But as to my faith… I don’t know what it is. I believe in something, I know that. It wouldn’t be so difficult if I didn’t. Whatever it is that, I suppose my path towards discovering it will begin tonight. Faith. It’s really a beautiful thing. I’d love to have it again.

Retro Blog: Autumn & Anticipation

It is definitely that time of year. The leaves are changing. The nights are getting cooler. The frogs of summer have given way to the crickets of autumn. You can go outside and look up into the twilight sky and see clouds illuminated, backlit by the already fallen sun. And then of course there’s football.

My Grandma, who is now living with my amazing wife and I, asked us the other day why she heard my girl screaming from the bedroom, “THROW THE DAMN BALL!!!” Sometimes all you can do is smile.

And remember that bedroom noises may be louder than you think.

But still leaves are falling, and chainsaws are running in the distance. The occasional gunshot echoes over the mountain ridges. All reminders that summer is slowly slipping away for another year.

There will still be warm days to come. Like a lover’s kiss in promise of their return. But first winter will arrive, filled with long dark nights, ice and snow. My girl and I have already begun nesting in anticipation. There are some beautiful days, when the ground is covered in snow, and all is quiet and peaceful.

The holidays  will soon come, when family gathers together to reminisce and to make new memories. But for me, this time now, when the evening air begins to go crisp and my thoughts turn to preparing for winter and sitting around a fire with my girl, this, this is the most wonderful time of the year.

A White Guy's Christmas Message

Once and for all…

*spoiler alert*

Santa Claus is a fictional character. He does not exist. He originated from Sinterklaas, the Dutch St. Nicholas, patron saint of children who lived in the 4^th century. The modern story of Santa Claus arose in the early 1820s when Clement Clark Moore wrote ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas’.

By the 1930s Coca Cola was bringing images of a red suited, jolly Santa to the world. Does he really exist? No. Is he white? That depends. Which Santa are you talking about? The one on the TV show with Rudolph that you watched last night or the one that you saw at the Mall last week?

Santa Claus is a state of mind, a representation of goodness, and if it makes African-American (or Asian or Hispanic) children feel more included to give their wish lists to a Santa of their race then no, Santa does not have to be white. He is, and always has been, whatever a lonely child needs him to be.

On to Jesus. Jesus is a historical person. It’s hard to find references to him in history books because oddly enough, there’s a HUGE chasm between religion and pretty much every other facet of the secular world these days, but yes Virginia, Jesus did exist.

Jesus however, was not white. For this one I’ll ask you to simply turn on your TVs and look at any report coming out of the Middle East. Now quickly shut it off, because any news report coming out of the Middle East isn’t going to be pretty. If there’s good news in that part of the world, you won’t hear about it in the West.

The reason I asked you to do that was to look at the PEOPLE. Notice what they look like. You didn’t see a lot of blonde hair and light skin did you? Probably not a lot of blue eyes either.

The first ‘white’ men recorded in Palestine, what is now the Holy Land, were the Romans. Jesus was a Jew, born in Galilee to Jewish parents. As the Bible, the Talmud and the Quran all agree, he certainly existed, but he likely would have looked like your typical Palestinian of today, with dark hair and eyes.

Me personally, I don’t get why either Santa Claus or Jesus have to be white’. It doesn’t matter to me.

Good kids will still get Christmas presents from a black Santa and I can still feel love from reading the teachings of a Jesus with dark, curly hair. Or from those of Mohammad or the Buddha for that matter.

But that’s just me.

Never More Beautiful

Fixing The Windows

One of the things that really gets to me about being hurt (I had four disks herniated in my neck and back by an injury at work 19 months ago) is that it's emasculating. I know a lot of that is probably in my head, but it really gets to me at times when I wonder how am I going to pay this bill, how am I going to make this repair, how am I going to move this heavy object. Two years ago I'd just do it. My head still hasn't caught up to my body. I'm not sure when the adjustment will finally happen. This morning when I woke up I felt a tickle on my neck. No, it wasn’t my girl. She had already left for work. It was air. There was a little bit seeping in from under the window. It only took a few minutes to caulk my window and my girl’s but it really made a difference and how I felt about myself. Everybody needs to feel useful. Two years ago I’d be up on the roof stringing Christmas lights, moving furniture around to make room for the tree, just being me. Today, I’m still learning to be the new me. And the new me has to be careful, because one wrong move could hurt me. A lot. I spent my entire career working with spinal cord injuries. Now I have one. There’s a twisted karma about that. I’m lucky. VERY lucky. I have a lot. Family, a lot of friends, possessions, a writing career that I’m going to make succeed. Still, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to let go of the days when I could go out and just play football with my kids, wrestle with my dog or tackle my girl. I’m still living, but it’s not the same.